I wasn't happy with the performance of the side mounted fan duct. Especially on small parts the air did not come close enough to the nozzle and because of the sideways acting force provided by the airflow the parts could deform during printing. Additionally the cooling effect was different on all sides of the model.
There are some alternative designs like https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2808152 which looks very promising but i decided to design my own.
Design goals:
- airflow as close as possible at the nozzle
- equal cooling on all sides
- simple mounting, if possible single part design
- include 40mm hotend fan adapter for silent operation
After a lot of tinkering and testing i came up with a very unique (?) solution.
It's a single part print without support which attaches magnetically to the screws/nuts on the extra mounting holes on the smart effecor. So these can still be used for mounting i.e. a zesty nimble (like on my printer) and the assembly can be taken off within seconds.
For part cooling i'm using a blower fan because high pressure is needed which axial fans do lack, i used a 50mm one but 40mm might work, too (couldn't find one locally which was specified at 24V)
(sorry for the bad image quality, it was too dark and the images hat to be reduced in quality quite a lot before uploading)
Thickness below the heatblock is 2.2mm, so there is still more than 1mm of clearance to the printed part, weight is 19g.
The prototype was printed in PLA which obviously isn't a great choice when mounted that close to the heat block It's ok when the part cooling fan is on but will deform quickly if its off.
I will probably use nylon when i'm happy with the design.
I'm just 1 hour into the first print so i can't say much about the viability of the design yet.
The design is not yet published, but will be soon and will be open source.
The smart effector model which i used to design the cooling solution is already available on thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3240616
I would be happy if you could provide some feedback